Shane Su­perville

Head of the Re­al Po­lice For Po­lice par­ty, Sgt Zane Bain, says there is an ur­gent need to re­store in­ter­est among mem­bers of the TTPS So­cial Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion (TTPSS­WA), ex­press­ing dis­ap­point­ment over what he de­scribed as a “low turnout” for the as­so­ci­a­tion’s elec­tions on Mon­day.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia on Tues­day, Bain, who con­test­ed the post of as­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, said the TTP­SWA’s elec­tions have in re­cent years strug­gled to at­tract more than 1,500 vot­ers, de­spite a mem­ber­ship of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000 of­fi­cers.

He said through­out his cam­paign, he and oth­er of­fi­cers had stressed the im­por­tance of vot­ing and ini­ti­at­ing change to im­prove their qual­i­ty of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. How­ev­er, he be­lieves more must be done to rekin­dle mem­bers’ en­gage­ment.

“I fail to see what more can be done in gen­er­at­ing vot­er turnout we would have liked to see, which would have been a more fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the will of the mem­ber­ship. So we need to fig­ure out a way to stim­u­late in the minds of these in­di­vid­u­als the im­por­tance of their in­volve­ment.

“We thought the cam­paign that we ran would have done so, be­cause we de­lib­er­ate­ly stayed away from the reg­u­lar rhetoric of promis­ing things we knew may or may not be de­liv­ered, and we tried to show a dif­fer­ent an­gle and en­cour­aged peo­ple in­ter­act­ing with the come out and vote.”

Bain al­so said while he has no in­ten­tion of con­test­ing the elec­tion re­sults, he was un­cer­tain why the out­come had not yet been an­nounced as of 2.30 p.m. on Tues­day. He added that in pre­vi­ous years, re­sults were typ­i­cal­ly made avail­able with­in hours of the vote.